Create systems, not hacks (2/7)

The next most important thing to understand about growth marketing

So the single most important idea in growth marketing is simple: “growth solves all problems” — so prioritise growth above almost everything else.

The next most important thing to understand about growth marketing is this:

Not all growth is created equal.
Some growth is temporary, while other growth lasts.

If your goal is to acquire millions of users, your marketing needs to become predictable, systematic, automated, and repeatable.

You can rely on hacks to get the first 100 users, or maybe the first 1000. But not to get millions of users.

For a startup to be considered a success, it needs to grow in the order of ~30% per month, over a sustained period of time. Things that produce one-off traffic spikes — like a PR launch, an incidental promoted post, or a viral TikTok video — aren't enough.

You need stability and predictability.
You need a strategy.

Growth marketing is about unlocking structural, compounding growth.

You need a machine that prints out customers, month after month after month.

For that, you need to approach marketing as a system.
As we wrote in our growth manifesto:

"Losers are forever attracted to shortcuts, "growth hacks" and ways to game the system. Forget about that. 

The essence of growth marketing is to build systems that drive user acquisition, activation and retention at scale.”

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How to start thinking about systems:

When it comes to systems-thinking in growth, most frameworks and mental models (AARRR, for instance) encourage you to compartmentalize your growth engine. They encourage you to break things down into small components.

We think that’s a mistake. 

It is mistaken, because exponential growth—the kind of growth you really want—is necessarily cyclical or compounding in nature, and therefore based on growth loops.

We will deep-dive into this topic in email 6, but suffice to say that growth loops are the framework that AARRR should have been.

Growth loops are always built around three fundamental systems:

1. User acquisition You need a system to generate traffic. Could be via paid ads, a sales team, influencer marketing, a Youtube channel, referral marketing, or anything else. There are options plenty (in fact, I'll share a list of 25+ distribution channels in one of the next emails)
   

2. Sales funnel Just getting seen is the first step, but it's not enough. You need to capture attention, and nurture people to become ready to work with you. You need a predictable way to turn cold traffic into customers.
   

3. Retention & engagement You can’t build a thriving business on a user base of inactive zombie users. So you need predictable ways to turn new signups into happy, active power users. Because those are the kind of people that pay up, drive referrals, leave 5-star reviews, and buy again and again.

Your acquisition system generates traffic and drives it into the sales funnel. The funnel turns cold traffic into excited new customers and engagement and retention systems help the customer get as much value from the product as possible. That can then generate three things: revenue, referral opportunities, and user-generated marketing assets.

Crucially, these things in turn feed your acquisition system again (!!): revenue allows you to buy paid ads, referrals invite new users, and user-generated content can rank for SEO. That’s how growth loops work, and is the essence of growth marketing.

Needless to say, we’ll explain about each of those systems in more detail later. 

For now, just remember the #1 thing about growth:

Calling it growth hacking is, while catchy, the biggest disservice we ever did to our craft.
Growth is about systems, not hacks.

In the next 3 emails we will cover the other 3 growth essentials:
- Front loading value
- Selling the worldview, not the product
- Speed matters

Cheers,

—Double Team

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P.S.
After two of us wrote the first draft of this email, we got into a massive discussion with others in the team, about whether we should also tell how to differentiate between good systems and poor ones.

The compromise? We’re explaining it here, in a P.S.  ;-)

Here goes:

– Poor systems are scattered, Good systems are tight — In a poor acquisition system, the budget is thinly spread across multiple channels. In robust acquisition systems, budget is focused on the highest performing channel >> highest performing creative >> highest performing angle.

– Poor systems are monolithic, good systems are resilient — Another reason to focus on systems building over seeking tactical gains, is that if things fail, the whole machine doesn’t come crashing down. You can simply ‘tighten that one loose screw in the system’.

– Good systems allow continuous optimisation — With hacks, small wins don’t matter. You need to hit a home run every quarter. With proper systems, small wins are gold because they can be stacked on top of one another without relying on groundbreaking ideas to fuel the growth engine.

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